Will Power Read Online Free PDF Page B

the coffin on wheels we were riding in.
    I could just make out a line of tall and narrow trees running alongside the road and pointing up into the heavens like spear tips. Cedars, perhaps. A quarter moon had just begun to rise, casting no useful light, so even the trees had a slightly sinister aspect that made absolutely no sense whatsoever. I noticed—from outside myself, as it were—that I was clinging to the edge of my seat with one claw of a right hand while the fingers of my left drummed silently, obsessively, on the seat cloth.
    Mithos, his sheer grimness rivaled for once by Ambassador Death’s, reached across to hold the shade open. What little light there was fell on his dour features as he gazed out into the passing trees. “This is the Vetch road?” he said.
    “Yes,” said the ambassador. “There is an inn where we can rest before we reach the village.”
    “The Black Horse?” Mithos asked, turning from the window. “Good. We have companions to meet there.”
    “That is most convenient,” said the ambassador. “Our roads lie together.”
    Convenient indeed
, I thought to myself uncomfortably. Everything about this little jaunt was extremely convenient, as if it had been arranged weeks ago. The idea that it was all coincidence seemed no more plausible to me than the tale of Dantir, renowned rebel-drunk and gypsy wanderer. I was wary of getting caught out twice.
    “Perhaps your friends can join me on my road north,” ventured the ambassador.
    Perhaps not. The sooner I got out of this mobile graveyard, the better.
    “What is your destination?” asked Mithos, casually enough, though I guessed he was probing.
    “North,” he said simply.
    “Specific!” I muttered, my discomfort switching suddenly into irritation.
    “No,” agreed the voice of the ambassador, calm and unoffended. “But accurate.”
    “Just not very helpful,” I persisted.
    “The ambassador has a right to keep his own business to himself,” Mithos remarked coolly.
    “I can’t say it fills me with confidence, that’s all,” I said sulkily into the blackness. The hint of skeptical hostility this remark contained had not really been intended, but I was wound as tight as a Dranetian merchant’s purse and in such situations tended to be the tool of my words, rather than the other way round.
    The ambassador chuckled invisibly, a rich and throaty gurgle of a laugh that raised the hair on the back of my neck.
    “Ever the realist, eh, Mr. Hawthorne?” he said when his amusement had passed. “Will Hawthorne the pragmatist. William the cynic, Bill the perceptive. A man who knows the world and sees through its various shell games as if they’re made of glass. A man too shrewd for principles, too practical to be distracted from the truth. . . .”
    This was an alarming speech, particularly for someone who had never set eyes on me before. He had pigeonholed me a little too accurately. It was like he had somehow seen into the way my head worked and seen the way I—in my less humble and bewildered moments—tended to see myself. I shifted in my seat.
    Suddenly there was a flash of light and the inside of the carriage flickered into the shifting radiance of a greenish flame. It sprouted and guttered from the tip of the ambassador’s right forefinger. As my jaw fell open, he spoke again, looking me squarely in the face with an odd smile. “But what
is
real, Mr. Hawthorne? What is true?”
    His bright eyes fastened on mine and held them for a moment, then his face loomed large, as if it had swelled to a great size, and filled the carriage, dwarfing me beneath it. I cried out and looked to Mithos, whosat in the strange light, his head lolling with sleep. The vast face of the ambassador hanging over me split into a broad grin and he began to laugh.
    With a start I awoke to find myself sitting in the darkened carriage as before. There was no sound or movement from my companions. As my heart slowed to normal again, I laid my head on the